Andrew M Brown is the Telegraph's obituaries editor.

Japanese disaster: we have to remind ourselves this isn't a horror movie

Watching the reams of footage of the Japanese earthquake on Youtube and the TV news, many of us will experience the feelings we get from a disaster movie. The same sort of feelings, anyway. It's not, obviously, that we enjoy watching the breathtaking scenes – the houses, car and ships tossed about like Monopoly pieces, or twisted “like liquorice” as a radio reporter said this morning. We’re not taking pleasure in it. It’s more that we’re amazed and astonished. And there's a degree of detachment that comes from the sheer scale. The images we're looking at are so removed from our daily experience.

But disaster movies aren't our only point of reference. A lot of the earthquake video was recorded by amateurs. It’s not polished or stylised like professional camerawork. It’s rough and ready and, as a result, even more immediate and real. This is the look that horror films strive for. By pretending their films are entirely made up of chunks of “found footage” stuck together, makers of films from Cannibal Holocaust in 1980 to Blair Witch Project (1999) and Cloverfield (2008) have tried to create the same shocking impact.

These films replicate the jerky camerawork and abrupt jump-cuts of home video shot on Handicams. Cloverfield is, strictly speaking, a disaster movie or monster movie rather than a horror movie. It is presented as chunks of handheld home video showing a monster smashing up Manhattan. The wobbly cinematography – "La Shakily Queasy-Cam", Roger Ebert called it – caused motion sickness in audience members, or so it was said.

I think we’re so accustomed to the heightened drama of cinema special effects that we see real-life drama in the same terms. We compare them. If something happens to us that's violent, sudden and unexpected – when, for example, I was mugged at school, and kicked in the head – we think: that was just like a film. We mean that the event, whatever it was, was out of the normal run of things, super-dramatic, and also it had a sense of unreality, or, perhaps, suspended reality.